A person. Commander Norton

Peter Norton is known to most users of personal computers. True, not everyone thinks about it, not everyone knows how great his merits are. Peter has been working for years on products like Norton Commander, Norton Utilities, Norton Disk Doctor. He is also the author of such popular books as Inside IBM PC, Inside OS / 2, and Programmer’s Reference.

Norton created a new direction of software development. He was an innovator both in terms of the market and technically. However, Peter Norton did not work for money and fame. At least he himself believes in it.
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Peter Norton was born in 1943. He got acquainted with computers in his early youth, when he worked in an insurance company as a seasonal employee. His first computer was the IBM PC. He bought this car as soon as it went on sale. Communication with computers became a serious hobby for Peter: he learned the basics of working with him as a user, and then began to study programming independently.

Norton studied at Ridon College (Portland, Oregon). He then entered the University of California at Berkeley, who graduated with a bachelor's degree in mathematics.

After university, Peter Norton got a job at an aerospace company that was based in Southern California. However, in the late 1970s, the industry began to lose ground in the market, and many specialists lost their jobs. Boeing, McDonnell Douglas and Lockheed made massive cuts.



The resulting free time Norton decided to spend on self-development: he spent five years in a Buddhist monastery on the coast of San Francisco.

Then there were attempts to work on freelance terms. However, he was not enthusiastic about the tasks that he had to solve: they seemed to him boring, and the abundance of orders led to overwork.

Let's try to return

Once Peter deleted a file with important information from the hard disk. When he realized that it was an annoying accident, and the file, it would seem, could not be returned, he got the idea to search for a way out of the current situation. As a result, Norton concluded that the information did not disappear without a trace, but moved to another part of the computer’s memory.

In 1982, Peter managed to write his program, which analyzed hidden areas of memory and made it possible to find lost data. He called it "Unerase". This program became the prototype of modern utility programs.



“When in 1982 I wrote my new program, Unerase, which allows you to restore a randomly erased file, no one seemed to need such programs. But I knew the value of the program written by me for me and for my friends. After some time, everyone understood how important it is to be able to recover lost data. Unerase has actually formed a new PC software market sector, which is called the service software market, ”Norton recalled.

Norton and his team

Peter Norton created his first company in 1982 with $ 30,000 in hands and an IBM computer. The company was named Peter Norton Computing. However, at the initial stage, its only employee was the founder himself.

In 1986, the company launched the Norton Commander (NC) shell. The first three versions were developed by programmer John Socha.


Version 1.0

John Socha received his masters and doctoral degrees in applied physics from Cornell University. After graduating, John became the first director of research and development at Peter Norton Computing. He was the second programmer in the company:

I began work on what later became known as Norton Commander. In the fall of 1984, when I was still a graduate student in applied physics at Cornell University. The first versions were written entirely in Assembly language. But this took too much time, so I soon switched to a mixture of C and Assembler, while most of the “real programmers” did not perceive C.

I called it [Norton Commander] "Visual DOS" with the abbreviation VDOS instead of the usual two-letter abbreviations that were used at the time.

Then I had a contract with Microsoft Press, in which I was supposed to write several books. I took two months of graduate school and wrote the first book.

The second book was supposed to broadcast about the small utilities that I used to use (for example, whereas, scrnsave, and others). But I never finished this book because of one utility, which I spent writing all my life.

That Socha attracted to the work of another programmer - Brad Kingsberry.

He became the developer of the NCD utility, which was later integrated into Norton Commander as NCD mode:

My previous employer had just closed its doors, so I sent my resume to several companies. I joined Peter Norton Computing in 1985. Peter answered me and paid for the tickets to Seattle, where he rested on a summer vacation, after which he hired on the spot. But since Peter was still on vacation, I started working right from a hotel in Seattle and worked from there for the first two weeks. Further, over the next 6 months I worked from the PNCI kitchen table. When Eileen, Peter's wife, started cooking dinner, I realized that the work day was over and went home.

Over time, the staff of PNCI has already become five people. Peter was engaged in the development, management, marketing and writing manuals from the "lair" of his home. And three of his employees worked at the top.

His whole [Norton] philosophy was reduced to a phrase that I constantly heard from him: “we will be engaged in this business while it is fun.” Therefore, the main incentive to do something was "cool" or "fun", and only then - money.

I never knew what would have happened if we had not earned money, but the process itself would have been fun. Perhaps it would still not be so fun, especially for Peter. But he did not seek to create "the next generation of software," and did not seek to earn a big pile of money. It was really fun time with him, he loved flexibility and did not like to work for someone.

NC Version 1.0 John Socha developed in 1984-1989.

Norton Commander for DOS is a file manager for DOS, which existed in 5 major versions - 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0, 5.0, and only the latest version has version 5.5. Many versions are still used by various enthusiasts and lie on various sites on the Internet.

Starting with version 2, Norton Commander has been hit with success, comparable to 123, WordPerfect and MS Word.

On the territory of the former USSR and Eastern Europe, the blue screen of Norton Commander has become synonymous with DOS. Many users have never suspected that this is not the native interface of DOS, and in Russian the words “Norton” and “Commander” became part of the jargon of IT staff, and became, in fact, synonymous with the file manager.

Norton Commander taught in schools and institutes of most countries of the former USSR, as well as in European colleges and universities in Eastern countries. The DOS era influenced the hiring process: in those days, the skill of using Norton Commander was perhaps the key factor in deciding whether to hire programmers.

The first years of development of Norton Commander (1984-1988) coincided with the dawn of MS-DOS: at that time it became the most widely used operating system on the planet. She quickly changed CP / M, and since the end of 1983, many software products created for MS-DOS have become dominant in their class and even served as the de facto standard for porting to other operating systems.

Utilities were also a fast-growing area. However, now many of them are already forgotten. In the meantime, we still remember Norton Commander (and someone still uses it) until now.


Version 5

In 1989, Norton’s sales amounted to $ 25 million. In 1990, Peter Norton Computing Incorporated merged with a large Californian software company, Symantec Corp. According to experts, at the time of the merger, the capital of the Norton company was at least $ 70 million.

In 2002, Norton joined the board of directors of Acorn Technologies, after investing in it.

Personal life and charity

In 1983, Peter Norton married Eileen Harris. They have two children.

Norton is a big fan of art and science. In 1989, he founded the Norton Family Foundation, the Norton Family Foundation, which invests about $ 1.5 million a year in various humanitarian projects.

Norton often helps financially and other funds - fighting AIDS, supporting beggars, protecting single people. Chet Norton also financed several US museums.

In 2000, Peter divorced his wife and moved to New York. After a while, he began to meet with Gwen Adams, a New York-based financier. In May 2007, they were married.

Other norton

If you think that Peter Norton is just a “man-disk”, or in extreme cases - a bureau for searching for lost files, you are mistaken. Norton played the role of enlightener in other aspects of hardware and software. Those who use a computer, every day felt the need for a "Programming Guide" or in the "Book on Assembly Language." And if such a need arose, they first of all appealed to Norton, wrote the Washington Post in 1987.



Peter Norton was also the author of the idea of ​​"personalization" of software promotion through the use of photos of the same model for the entire product line. This principle is still used by Symantec. Norton himself acted as a model on the boxes of Norton Utilities and other Symantec products from the Norton line.



Peter Norton had his own view on software development. Peter Norton spoke about his concept for developing computer programs during his visit to Moscow at the opening of the Komtek-91 exhibition on April 8, 1991: “It consists of customer and user orientation, anticipation of market trends, and software development to simplify and optimize . You should not hunt for new advanced programs - it is much easier, more convenient and more effective to develop a new improved version based on an existing software product. This attracts users who are familiar with the previous version of the program. ”

Its most famous software products are Norton Commander, NortonUtilities, Norton Disk Doctor, Norton Integrator. Norton Programmer's Guides is a series of four automated directories for programming languages: ASSEMBLER, C, PASCAL and BASIC. These directories are noteworthy because they work online and allow you to get all the information you need at the moment, which is much more convenient than accessing the reference manual.

*****

Regardless of the field of activity (be it science or business), Norton values ​​creative abilities and business savvy most of all. Now he is an expert in the field of computer technology, a journalist, author of books sold in millions of copies.

Peter Norton is the name that entered the computer history of the 20th century. This is the man who first began writing programs for ordinary people. He tried to look critically at his developments and ask himself: “Will I be able to do the same again, only easier, even better, more convenient?” Sometimes he did not find a solution, but it was this concept that was the beginning of his takeoff, his innovation, The basis of his contribution to the world of software for personal computers.